White Nationalist Site Joins Anti-LGBT Groups in Campaign Against Southern Poverty Law Center

A white nationalist website has joined in the campaign against the Southern Poverty Law Center launched by anti-LGBT organizations that object to the SPLC's description of them as "hate groups."

VDARE.com Tuesday tweeted out a story critical of the SPLC, calling it the "Southern Poverty Lie Center" and using the hashtag #SPLCExposed, reports watchdog group Media Matters.

The campaign was started by a coalition of right-wing groups and is led by the Family Research Council. The right has been denouncing media for using the "hate group" description in articles about the Alliance Defending Freedom, an anti-LGBT legal group that last week hosted a closed-door address by Attorney General Jeff Sessions. The ADF has demanded that ABC News apologize for using the term, even though it was placed in quotes or qualified with "alleged" and attributed to the SPLC. Another far-right legal group, Liberty Counsel, has sued charity monitoring service GuideStar over its use of the SPLC "hate group" description, and GuideStar has agreed to remove those labels from its website.

In announcing the campaign, the Family Research Council sent a note to supporters, saying, "Despite SPLC's baggage -- which also includes connections to two liberal gunmen -- they continue to be cited as a credible source by mainstream media and others. With SPLC in the spotlight, we must expose this organization for what it really is -- a left wing smear group who has become exactly what they set out to fight, spreading hate and putting targets on people's backs." The note, quoted by the conservative Washington Examiner, was referring to the 2012 shooting at the FRC's Washington headquarters and the attack last month on a congressional baseball practice.

The reasoning behind the campaign goes like this: The SPLC uses the "hate group" label to smear those with whom it disagrees (along with inciting violence against them, a charge that has been rightly called preposterous), and the organization is more concerned with making money than anything else. VDARE.com's article tars the SPLC by saying, "We call it the '$PLC,' as recognition that its nation-breaking agendas are also cover for its real concern: fund-raising and nest-feathering."

The latter accusation is fairly easy to dispense with. GuideStar gives the SPLC its highest rating, "Gold," for transparency, and another monitoring service, Charity Navigator, gives the group three out of four stars regarding how efficiently it uses its funds. As for the "hate group" designation, Media Matters points out, "FRC and other hate groups have repeatedly pushed the myth that SPLC labels as 'hate groups' those organizations that it 'simply disagree[s] with.' In fact, SPLC has more extensive criteria for the distinction. It designates anti-LGBTQ hate groups as such when they knowingly spread 'demonizing lies about the LGBT community,' engage in 'baseless, incendiary name-calling,' or actively work to criminalize LGBTQ people. Regarding anti-immigrant groups, SPLC wrote that though 'many groups criticize high levels of immigration and some ... typically confront or harass individual immigrants and their supporters, anti-immigrant hate groups generally go further by pushing racist propaganda.'"

VDARE.com certainly seems to push "racist propaganda." The SPLC's page on the site, run by the VDARE Foundation, offers several choice quotes from writers it has published, such as "America was defined -- almost explicitly, sometimes very explicitly -- as a white nation, for white people, and what that means is that there is virtually no figure, no law, no policy, no event in the history of the old, white America that can survive the transition to the new and non-white version" and "Jewish activity collectively, throughout history, is best understood as an elaborate and highly successful group competitive strategy directed against neighboring peoples and host societies." Just today, VDARE.com carried a post by a writer named Hubert Collins, who asserted, "I believe that the races are different and unequal and that racial integration is inherently bad."

The site was founded in 1999 by Peter Brimelow, an immigrant from England, and named after Virginia Dare, the first English child born in the Americas. The SPLC writes, "While Brimelow vehemently denies that the site is white nationalist, preferring instead 'politically incorrect,' many of the articles published there contain typical white nationalist themes; Brimelow also concedes that he does publish some 'white nationalist' authors, like Jared Taylor of American Renaissance magazine. They decry the demise of white America, blaming immigrants, multiculturalists, and members of the 'Treason Lobby' -- essentially groups concerned with protecting immigrants' human and civil rights -- for undermining the racial cohesion of the nation."

A column it carried from Taylor "dismisses 'the fantasy of racial equality,' claims the Civil Rights Act of 1964 'stripped Americans of the right to make free decisions,' and says that '[b]lacks, in particular, riot with little provocation,'" the SPLC continues. VDARE.com also frequently publishes articles by Kevin MacDonald, who "believes Jews are genetically driven to undermine the power of whites by pushing such things as Third World immigration."

It sounds like the "hate group" label fits.